Hacks for Crafting a Killer Webinar Presentation — Part 1: The Webinar Content

Crafting a killer webinar presentation is not simple, but with this two-part blog series, you will have the perfect tutorial at your fingertips to learn how to craft your very own killer webinar presentation that delivers results.

This blog series is ideal for those who want to host webinars, but don’t have the budget for an in-house content writer or graphic designer to help pull together killer webinar presentations. The good news is, you don’t need that in-house expertise! As long as you or someone internally is an expert on the content topic you wish to speak about, you can still pull off a professional webinar presentation that will be sure to impress.

A webinar presentation utilizes a PowerPoint 99.9% of the time unless you are hosting a webinar demo of a software platform. This PowerPoint presentation is the focus of the webinar and what your webinar attendees will be looking at throughout the length of the entire presentation. Since it is the star, it is important to build your webinar presentation with a solid foundation. That solid foundation is your content. The content is your webinar script.

It is not ideal to start building your webinar presentation before your script. I’ve met way too many webinar speakers that prefer to just “wing it” when it comes to what they will be saying during the live webinar. If you’re a charismatic speaker and know your content inside and out, the webinar might still go well, but you will be doing your webinar audience a disservice.

Here is why winging it is never a good idea:

You’re able to easily get off track as you didn’t properly plan on how to deliver the content

You might share information that confuses attendees or not share enough information

If you’re stressed out before the webinar, sick, or having a bad day — you might lose focus and forget key points or stories that would enhance the content of webinar

You’re more likely to be nervous, as each slide you look at you will have to think of what to say, vs. already knowing what to say

These are just a few reasons, but there are so many more! A webinar presentation script is your life boat. It helps you to be confident in what you’re saying and knowing you are delivering the very best content to your audience, at the right time in the live webinar presentation.

Considering the webinar script is the foundation of your webinar presentation we are going to review in-depth how to prepare your script and then how to use that script to select the content for your webinar presentation.

First start you will start with a Word document to note all your ideas, points you want to make and the flow of the webinar presentation you are aiming for. It is much easier to start from one continuous document, than going directly to PowerPoint and figuring it out from there.

Once you have down the direction you want, it’s time to start building your script on that same Word document, from start to finish.

When I say script, I mean you really want to write down each word you plan on speaking during the live webinar. Of course, you can’t script the Q&A section, or what you might say based on your audience’s poll answers or chat comments (and you most definitely need to comment or relate to those answers!), but that will be the only time you need to think of what to say — the rest of your webinar presentation track will be a well-oiled machine. That way if a webinar attendee asks a question that you know you will be covering later in the webinar, you can tell them to stay tuned, vs. side-tracking the whole webinar presentation to answer that question and potentially confuse other attendees who don’t understand the concept yet.

As you build your script, include the following 9 parts. Through writing down content for all 9 parts, you will then have your entire talk track ready for the day of the webinar and ensure it aligns with your webinar presentation PowerPoint content and what main points you want your webinar attendees to takeaway.

Additionally, during your dry-runs, as you read out loud your webinar presentation script to your team, as a group you can collaborate on gaps in content or chunky transitions. With this feedback, you can quickly update your script so that the live webinar is seamless and you can ensure you are hitting on all the reasons your webinar attendees signed up to attend in the first place.

The 9 Parts of a Webinar Presentation Script

Greeting

During this greeting portion, you will welcome your webinar attendees, thank them for joining, perhaps note a few housekeeping items. You will then introduce yourself and your company, what you do and why you are relevant to speak on this topic. If you have co-webinar speakers, have them introduce themselves as well.

It would be a good idea to run through a very quick tutorial for using the webinar platform from an attendee perspective if you plan to have participants interact with the webinar platform to chat or fill out a poll, for example. Basically, whatever information that is important for you to share to ensure a successful webinar should be stated here before getting started.

Tip: If you do plan on interacting with your webinar attendees through poll, chat or other webinar engagement features like social sharing or white-boarding, you should decide at what times you would like this interaction to happen and place it in your script accordingly so that you do not forget to invite them to write an answer in the chat or fill out the poll at the times it makes sense during the content delivery.

2. Agenda

Run through the agenda of the webinar presentation. Your agenda should have 3–5 bullets on what you plan on covering, each bullet should be for a different section of the webinar, and you’ll want to say how long each section should take to review and how long you intend for Q&A at the end of the webinar to answer questions.

To create a “section” you will want to break up the content you intend for them to learn in different chunks as to create the different elements of the webinar. Through doing this, it will make the delivery of content easy to understand in sizable chunks.

As an example of different sections, your first bullet on your agenda could be “The What”, second bullet can be “The Why”, third can be “The How” fourth bullet could be “The When”.

3. Objectives

Write out the objectives of attending this webinar. You could talk about what your attendees will get out of being there, possible next steps after the webinar, or what webinar attendees will now be able to do because of participating in your webinar.

4. Separate Sections for Each Agenda Item

This will be the bulk of your script as you are writing out the content for the entire reason people are attending your webinar in this part. This content is founded on your agenda and objectives of the webinar presentation.

Based on the sections you selected in your agenda and using the example in #2 (the what, why, how, when sections), you will write out all the content you want to say that explains each section individually. You will start with section 1 and write down everything you plan on saying to explain this section, and then move on to section 2, and so on. It is important for clarity that you don’t jump around the different sections during your script, as you might confuse your attendees. Of course, the content should build on each other — stay away from language like, “we will discuss this in section 4” if you are still in section 1.

5. Stories and examples

Your script might include stories and examples alongside the main content for each of your sections.

These are great to include to further explain your point or concept. Another place to include these is after you have reviewed all the sections on your agenda, and then you share stories or examples to reinforce the content in a different way after your audience has had time to process the primary content.

Regardless of how you do it, ensure you have enough relatable stories or examples to include in the content. Stories help your audience understand complex ideas and for them to imagine taking the content and implementing it into their world.

6. Recap / Takeaways

Once you’ve completed section #5 and #6, you will recap what you have shared today, why you have shared it and the top 3–5 things you hope your audience takes away and remembers post-webinar.

During this part would be a good time to encourage your audience to fill out a poll on the favorite thing they heard today, or start the Q&A portion.

7. Next Steps for Attendees

When hosting a webinar, there is usually a next step or action you’d like your webinar audience to take. Perhaps that could be registering for another webinar, downloading an eBook, signing up for a one-on-one demo or encouraging them to buy your product. Whatever it is, give them all the information needed to make that next step. You don’t even want to assume they know what the next step is, or how to complete that step.

8. Contact information

Share all the ways to get ahold of you, the webinar speaker, or the company you are speaking on behalf of. Include emails, phone numbers, websites and social sites.

9. Closing Comments

Thank them for attending and if there is anything left unsaid, now is the time to say it or continue to reinforce the next action you’d like them to take and how it would benefit them.

As you write your script, take special care to write it out in a conversational tone as you would speak. Write out whole sentences, not fragments — that way if you get nervous or tripped up, you know exactly where to pick back up. And most importantly — practice, practice, practice your script until you can read it as though you are not actually reading from a script. Additionally, time yourself reading your script out loud to ensure you’ve written enough content to last the entire webinar presentation, or see if you need to cut content, as it could be too long.

Once your webinar script is complete and you feel comfortable delivering it as is, even without the aid of a PowerPoint, you can start building the webinar presentation PowerPoint!

You will use this final script to pull from for the content you place on your webinar PowerPoint slides. Take your script and using the highlight feature in Word, highlight the most important elements from each of the above 9 webinar script parts. The idea is to transition these parts to your PowerPoint slides. Building your webinar presentation PowerPoint will be quick and easy following this method.

Note, you will not actually copy and paste your highlighted content directly onto your slides. Instead, you will want to shorten your talk track into short, digestible snippets or “call-outs” to place on your slides.

Part 2 Teaser

In Part 2 of this blog series, I will share a sample PowerPoint template which includes what slides to include in your webinar presentation based on the 9 parts of the webinar script. Additionally, each slide in the template will have examples of the type of content to put on these slides. So don’t start building your webinar PowerPoint yet.

In Part 2 we will first review how to design and build your webinar presentation PowerPoint, then how to place your content on this final PowerPoint design and finally tips for adding images to enhance the final look of the PowerPoint.